Hello everyone, hope you're all doing well, and welcome to my review of Dragon Age Inquisition! For some reason I never got around to playing this when it first came out. I think that was around the same time as The Witcher 3, so this one must have gotten overlooked. I've been a fan of this series from the beginning, and I know I've definitely played all of the previous entries, but it's hard for me to remember much about them. The thing that stands out the most for me were all the interesting characters that join your team, and the ability to switch up your party with the ones you like best. Since I don't recall much from the other Dragon Age games I wasn't sure what to expect going into Inquisition, but maybe it's better that way. In any case, now that I've finished the game let me give you my thoughts on it.
Dragon Age Inquisition is an action RPG developed by Bioware, and it's the third major installment of the series. When you first start a new game you get the option to create your character. This means you get to determine what race you'd like to play as, Human, Dwarf, Elf, or Qunari. I don't think there's any major differences between these races, other than the way they look, so it doesn't really matter which one you pick. After that you can change their appearance even further to fine tune and customize them until you're satisfied. The game gives you a lot of freedom to make the character as unique as you want it to be, which is nice. Then finally you will need to decide what class to play as, Warrior, Mage, or Rouge. This is the most important choice, since it will determine what weapons and abilities you'll be able to use, as well as how you will approach combat situations.
Once your character is all set the game begins and you're thrown into the action. There's a war going on between the Mages and the Templars, when suddenly a massive rift open in the sky, resulting in a huge explosion. You come falling out of this rift with no recollection of who you are, or how you got here. A soldier named Cassandra finds you and takes you into custody, noticing you have a mysterious glowing green mark on your hand and you decide to help her try and close this dangerous rift. After fighting your way up a mountain, you discover that this green mark on your hand is the only way to permanently close the rift. You save the day, and now everyone believes you to be some kind of god, or divine creature.
Eventually you learn that there are rifts all over the world that need closing, and everyone knows you're the only person who's capable of doing this. People look to you for guidance, even though you have no memory, and have no idea why you possess these powers to begin with. Soon after the Inquisition is established, with you as it's leader, and you travel all over the world helping to close these rifts and restore order. Along the way you amass a small army of loyal followers, and you build a base called the Skyhold, where you're basically the King. At this base you can store equipment, upgrade items, talk to people, and most importantly, decide where you should travel to next and what missions to take on.
From Skyhold you can look at a map of the world and choose from one of many regions to travel to next. These different locations are open world areas where you can complete side missions, story missions, level up your character, find new weapons and armor, and also recruit new members to the Inquisition. There are quite a few locations to pick from, some larger than others, but each one has it's own design with plenty to see and do. Every time you set out to a new place you get to choose your party members. You can select three additional people to join you, and you can control each character by switching between them on the fly. This makes it so you can play as a Warrior, Mage, or Rouge regardless of what class you picked for the main character.
As the game progresses and you explore more areas you will be adding more people onto the team, giving you a larger list of characters to choose from. Each character levels up just like you, and you can spend the experience points to learn new moves for each one. They can also get better weapons and armor, so you'll be spending a lot of time building up every member of your team. That's pretty much the entire game, going from place to place, fighting enemies, and continuing the story.
The combat is very basic, and it gets boring really fast. You hold down a button to attack, and you can also perform special moves by pressing another button, but there's very little strategy or skill involved. The other three characters attack automatically, so as long as you're at the right level enemies shouldn't give you a hard time. Since there's so much combat in the game I wish it was more satisfying, or engaging, because it's by far what you'll be doing the most.
Even though there are a good amount of different locations to explore, and most of them look really good, they all consist of the same quests which can make them feel tedious. You'll be collecting a lot of things, talking to a lot of people, choosing what dialog options to respond with, and closing a lot of rifts. After a while I stopped going to any place that wasn't a main story area. Things got so repetitive that I just wanted to get to the end, which is never a good sign in any game.
Since I was a fan of the previous games in this series I really thought I would enjoy this one as well. The story started off great, with lots of interesting characters and locations to discover. Leveling up my party members and choosing what weapons and abilities they would have was fun, but the actual gameplay dragged everything down. Combat is clunky and unsatisfying, which got boring way faster than I expected. Exploring all the different locations on the map was nice for a while, but doing the same missions over and over again turned it into a grind. There was a lot of potential here for a solid action RPG experience, unfortunately this seems like a step backwards from the other Dragon Age games. I don't often say this, but I honestly wouldn't recommend this game. I'm going to give Dragon Age Inquisition a grade of........................
C -
Thank you for reading my review of Dragon Age Inquisition, I hope you enjoyed it!